


Five Weddings That Happened, And The One That Didn't

by language_escapes



Series: Instead of My Saints 'verse [12]
Category: Criminal Minds
Genre: Alternate Universe, Kid Fic, Multi
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-12-18
Updated: 2011-12-18
Packaged: 2017-10-27 12:30:35
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,512
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/295886
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/language_escapes/pseuds/language_escapes
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Five weddings in the Hotchner-Gideon-Rossi family.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Five Weddings That Happened, And The One That Didn't

**Author's Note:**

> Part of the Instead of My Saints 'verse

#1

It isn’t exactly a surprise that JJ is the first to get married. She may be the youngest, but she’s also more outgoing and not nearly as commitment phobic as Derek or Emily or even Spencer. Hotch finds out first, which he finds fitting since he IS the mother, and he deserves some perks from his gender-switched role in the family. JJ squeals in his ear from over the phone; she’s at her apartment in DC, only an hour away, but apparently Will is still there and, if the grumbling in the background is to be believed, still down on one knee.

Hotch can’t help but be touched that he found out about her acceptance of Will’s proposal before Will did.

After that, it’s a whirlwind of commotion. JJ wants to get married quickly, but she also wants to have a sort of fairytale wedding. Hotch wishes she would choose one or the other, because his kitchen table can’t be found underneath the wedding invitations, wedding catalogues, maps to potential wedding locales, and books on how to plan a wedding. Spencer flies in immediately from California, where he’s working on his second (second!) PhD, and Derek starts driving home from Chicago on his weekends off. Hotch thinks they’re mostly there to watch him get new gray hairs every day.

Dave thinks it’s wonderful, of course, but then Dave had five younger sisters, one of whom was married four or five times. And that doesn’t even include his thousands (well, maybe twenty) nieces and nephews, who are all older than their own kids, and all much, much more married.

JJ spends half of her time at their house, and half of her time living her regular life, including her job and actually talking to Will. She picks out her portion of the wedding quickly enough. Emily and Penelope will be the bridesmaids, of course, and she isn’t going to choose a maid of honor, because that’s just rude when you have two wonderful sisters. She also asks Rebekah, their cousin through Jason, to be her other bridesmaid. Penelope will be in charge of her bachelorette party; Emily, her bridal shower.

She doesn’t so much ask as tell Hotch and Dave that they’ll both be walking her down the aisle, one on either side of her. Hotch later denies the tears they all claimed to see.

Will doesn’t have much family, and what little family he does have he mostly doesn’t talk to, so he asks his best friend Rick to be his best man, and Derek and Spencer to be the other groomsmen. JJ suggests they make Spencer the flower girl instead, which leads to pillows and paper being thrown everywhere.

Then there is the bridal shower (really, Hotch didn’t think anyone needed that many toasters) and the cake tasting, and the desperate search for someone to officiate the wedding, and the flower selecting and the bridesmaid dress fitting and the frantic search for tuxedos that don’t make Derek look like Secret Service or Spencer look like a little boy playing in Daddy’s clothes.

Finally, _finally_ , after enough selecting and fitting and searching to last Hotch a lifetime, it’s the wedding day.

He’s made it this far without (really) crying, and he’s determined to make it through the day.

The wedding party is getting lined up, one of Dave’s great-grand nieces, selected to be the flower girl, waiting at the front, with Rebekah gently keeping her in line and laughing with Derek about something that Hotch can’t hear. Behind them, Penelope is fretting about her dress while Spencer rolls his eyes and reassures her for what must be the fiftieth time since they bought them that the color does not make her look like a beached whale. Hotch doesn’t quite know where she got that analogy from, but he does admit that it makes for excellent imagery. Meanwhile, just behind them, Emily and Rick stare at each other, each shifting awkwardly and trying to make it seem like they’re not both desperately trying to figure out what to say to each other when they only met last week at the rehearsal.

And next to him is JJ, looking beautiful in her wonderfully tailored wedding dress, and also looking about ready to kill someone.

“Will you guys get to the front already?” she hisses at the men. “We can’t start till you’re all up there! And Rick, go drag Will out to the alter by the necktie if you have to, but I wanted to be married in forty minutes, because that’s about how long it will be until I can’t walk in these shoes.”

Wisely, the men skedaddle, so that he and Dave are the only two men left in the procession. Hotch touches JJ’s elbow.

“Breathe,” he advises quietly, and JJ takes in a deep breath, letting it out slowly like he taught her years ago. Dave laughs on JJ’s other side.

“Wedding day jitters,” he proclaims. “I’ve been there myself. Three times!”

“Now Dave, don’t jinx it,” Hotch scolds, and JJ giggles, a little hysterically.

“I’m fine,” she declares, and everyone looks at her skeptically, even Sylvia the flower girl. Before she can say anything else, though, the organ music starts playing and JJ stiffens. Rebekah shuffles Sylvia into place and fixes her hair while Emily and Penelope beam at JJ and grip her hand one last time before stepping back into their place. Hotch grabs one of JJ’s hands, while Dave grabs the other, and the doors swing open.

Hotch’s baby girl is getting married.

#2

“You want me to be your best man?” Spencer asks, stunned. He supposes he really shouldn’t be; after all, he and Derek grew up together, shared the same bedroom for way, way too long, and call each other once a week without fail. They’re from the same foster family, they wrote The Agreement together, and they successfully outwitted Dave many a time together. Spencer taught Derek how to do nonlinear equations; Derek taught Spencer how to not get punched every day (unless it was by Derek, and then it didn’t count, because those were brother-punches and they contained only love, except when they didn’t). Spencer knows all of Derek’s secrets, or at least the ones that matter, and Derek knows all of Spencer’s. This is what families do, he knows.

He’s still surprised. Even after all these years, it’s always a bit of a shock to realize that he has a family.

“Yeah, man, who else would I ask?” Derek says, his eyes sparkling with laughter as he punches Spencer gently on the shoulder. “Best man, best friend, best brother to be found.”

Spencer flushes, looks down, and clears his throat noisily. “Well I, ah, I guess it’s better than flower girl, anyway.”

#3

Penelope doesn’t believe in the institution of marriage. It’s an outdated ritual used to control women and to sell them from one man to another, she firmly believes. It’s especially bad in her case, since she has two dads, even if she calls one of them Mom, and that’s not even counting her bio-dad and her dead step-dad. Or her first foster dad, who she doesn’t really count anymore since she hasn’t heard from him in years, except for the occasional postcard that shows up in her postal box. In which case, she has five men to auction her off to another man, and only one woman, who is also dead. Nevertheless, it doesn’t matter, because Penelope doesn’t believe in marriage, and she will not be sold, not by Dave or Mom or deadbeat foster dad or bio-dad or dead-step-dad.

Except that she really, really loves Kevin. And wedding dresses are really pretty, and she has a weakness for pretty things. And if JJ can have a fairytale wedding, why can’t she?

In the end, she justifies it by proposing to Kevin, not the other way around, and resolving to keep her last name. Penelope Lynch just sounds bad.

The wedding isn’t quite fairytale, but Penelope has always been less of the pretty little princess and more of the kickass misunderstood witch, and it definitely suits her. Macarena-ing down the aisle had been a blast, and watching Mom attempt to shake his boo-tay was hysterical, and she hopes to God the wedding videographer got a shot of it. If he didn’t, she’s totally stiffing him on the tip. Spencer can’t decide whether to die of embarrassment, burst into laughter, or kill someone in his role of flower-girl-slash-ring-boy-slash-bridesmaid, and Penelope’s only regret is that she couldn’t convince him to wear the dress she had made special, just for him, complete with purple sparkles. She had managed to get the tiara on him right before he went down the aisle, though. She’ll have blackmail photos for life.

Since Hotch and Dave acted as her security detail down the aisle (she can’t say that they gave her away, since that goes back to the whole patriarchal-controlling-marriage thing), she reserves the first dance for Derek. Kevin looks a little flustered when she pushes him away and flies into Derek’s arms, but she figures he’ll understand. Of all her boyfriends, he was always the most accepting of her crazy, cracked out, totally weird family.

Emily gets to give the first speech of the evening, and despite her excellent speaking skills, she barely gets through two or three sentences before she’s speaking through tears. Penelope is grateful Emily opted for the waterproof mascara, since she always thought Emily’s Goth look in high school was just a little bit weird, and the mascara down the face not particularly attractive. Then again, she liked pink, which is pretty much the anathema of anything Goth.

JJ makes the rounds, swapping stories with family members, talking about her own blissful marriage and her pregnancy. But she spends most of her night just sitting happily next to Penelope, holding her hand under the table and grounding her to reality through her night of fantasy and make-believe. It’s JJ that keeps it real for Penelope, whispering in her ear every hour or so, “It’s real. You’re not dreaming, you’re not making this up. You’re married to a wonderful man you love, and he loves you.”

When she looks at Kevin, adorkable in his tuxedo and overly-large glasses, she knows it’s true.

#4

Emily stares at the simple, formal invitation in shock. She knows, intellectually at least, that Spencer had kept in touch with her, at least a little bit, but she hadn’t known it in her heart. She hadn’t understood what it meant. And now she’s staring at an invitation to Elle’s wedding, after almost fifteen years of hearing nothing from her at all.

There’s a handwritten note attached to the inside. “After all these years,” it reads, “you’re still the family of my heart. Please come. I need you.”

After calling around to the rest of the family, Emily finds out that they all received an invitation, each with a handwritten note, all begging the family to come. Mom and Spencer already know their answer- they probably loved Elle the hardest. Derek alternates between fury and happiness, unable to decide which he feels more. But Emily knows Derek, and knows the family is family for life with him, and he’ll go. JJ and Penelope, they’ve lived over half their lives without Elle in them, but they remember her fondly, and they remember how she broke their hearts.

Elle broke all of their hearts, really.

They’ll go, though, and so will Dave, even though he has never met Elle, even though he didn’t even know she existed until almost a year into his living with them. He’ll go because the family is going, and Elle is the foster daughter he never knew, but always lived with, in one way or another.

Emily isn’t sure.

She doesn’t forgive people who break her heart so easily, not like Spencer who always seems eager to get hurt over and over again, not like Penelope and JJ, who love unconditionally. And she’s not Derek, who can master two conflicting emotions at one time and not see the contradiction. She’s not Mom. She can’t sacrifice herself for the greater good.

When Elle left, it destroyed her. No one thinks so, of course. Everyone was so tied up in protecting Spencer and appeasing Derek that they hardly noticed the three girls, who were already so good at hiding their own emotions, and Emily best of all. The Diplomat’s Daughter, the ice princess, Queen of her own heart. But Elle was her best friend. Elle was the first person she opened up to, after months of tension between them. Elle was the complete opposite of her- rough around the edges, blunt, street smart. Emily was sharp as glass and just as cutting, and could name all the countries in the world but couldn’t name the street three blocks over. They were total opposites, and fit together perfectly.

Elle was the first woman Emily ever fell in love with, and she’s not sure if she can stand having her heart broken all over again.

#5

He knows he probably shouldn’t be here. The invitation was probably sent _pro forma_ , and not meant to be taken literally. He knows the others, they’re all married or partnered now, he’d seen the wedding announcements, clipped them carefully out of the paper and kept them in his wallet until they fell apart, and even then, he taped them back together and put them between pages in a book, but the others, they didn’t send invitations.

Spencer did.

Jason’s palms are sweaty, and he’s terrified of walking into that room, so full of the family he walked away from in a misguided attempt to save them from himself. The wedding won’t start for another twenty minutes, and he’s sure Spencer is about to die from anxiety. He just wants to see him, just once, wants to see the man he’s become, wants to see the triple-Masters, double-Doctorate man he helped raise. It can’t hurt.

It hurts so much it’s nearly unbearable.

He walks into the hall where the wedding will take place, and he doesn’t see any of the immediate family. He figures they’re probably all part of the wedding party, and relaxes a bit. He sees his sister, Rachel, and her partner, Helena, standing at the front, talking with an elderly couple, but that’s the only family he recognizes. Until he looks to find a seat, and then he sees Elle sitting in the back row, by herself.

Things had not ended well between them, Jason knows, but it’s twenty years in the past, so he walks over and sits down next to her.

“Is this the row for estranged family members?” he asks, a small smile tugging at his lips. Elle looks at him for a long moment, and then her lips curl upwards.

“Speak for yourself, Dad. I made my reconciliation a few years ago,” she quips, and it should hurt, but it doesn’t, and instead he laughs.

They pass the time talking about what they’ve done over the last twenty years, and by the time the wedding begins, Jason’s nerves have calmed somewhat, and he’s holding Elle’s hand affectionately, which he hasn’t done since before the accident, all those years ago. He wonders if she still blames him; he has always blamed himself, and always will.

But the wedding begins, and suddenly Jason has tunnel vision for the family he left behind. Spencer is standing at the front, looking nervous and skittish, and more handsome and adult than Jason could even imagine. Derek is standing next to him and elbowing and point down the aisle at the… flower boy, who Jason thinks might be Henry, Jenny’s son. He’s never met his grandson, but today, he’s hopeful.

He doesn’t know how the family does it, ensuring that the bride likes the sisters enough to make them the bridesmaids, but somehow they’ve done it again, and Emily (looking so much and nothing at all like her mother), Penelope (still full of spunk and charm), and Jenny- JJ now (the youngest, but somehow looking the oldest, and so confident) walk down the aisle, the steps so familiar to them now that they seem to be doing it by rote.

Jason barely notices the bride. She’s probably a lovely girl, and he hopes to get to know her later, but for now, his focus is on his family.

Hotch and Rossi are sitting in the front pew, next to Rachel, Helena, and the elderly couple that must be the bride’s parents. Hotch looks so much older now, at least from the back, his hair almost totally gray, but his back is still ramrod straight. Rossi looks like Rossi, with a casual slouch Jason could pick out from a crowd. He wonders if the kids still call Hotch Mom. That always made him laugh.

The wedding sails by, and Spencer only chokes on his vows six or seven times, and then it’s time for the reception. Spencer had opted for a cheaper option, and so people are clearing away the folding chairs they sat in at the wedding and helping set up tables. Jason grabs Elle, and they walk over to where the wedding party is assembled, doing the routine photo taking.

Spencer sees him first, and freezes, ruining an otherwise beautiful picture with his bride. His mouth drops open, and his wife frowns at him in confusion, and glances over to where Jason is standing. Slowly, everyone in the wedding party, and the wedding photographer, looks over to where Jason is standing.

He feels like he’s under a spotlight, and it’s uncomfortable and awkward, and all he can hope for is that Hotch or Derek decide not to punch him. He thinks that one of them might have, but Spencer saves the day, stepping away from the group and walking over to him. Elle scurries over to the rest of the family, and Jason can see them having a whispered conference from his peripheral vision.

His eyes, though, are focused on Spencer.

“You came,” Spencer says, finally, after swallowing several times, his Adam’s apple bopping up and down like a boat in rough waters. “I, uh, I didn’t think you would.”

“Hoping I wouldn’t?” Jason corrects, questioning even as he says it. Spencer shakes his head fiercely.

“Hoping you would, actually.” He grins awkwardly, his hair falling in his face. “Guess it’s true then. You always do get what you want on your wedding day.”

Like that, Spencer forgives him, and Jason can’t stop himself from grabbing him into a hug. He doesn’t mind admitting that he’s crying. He’s missed Spencer, he’s missed them all, and he’s wanted to come home for so long and never known how. After a minute, he feels someone grabbing at Spencer, and he lets go.

“Shove over, you big Dad hogger,” Penelope says, and then he’s hugging Penelope. Then JJ comes up from the side and hugs both of them, and Emily joins on the other side. They let go after a moment, laughing and crying at the same time, and Jason looks over at the two people he knows he can’t convince to forgive him.

But Derek’s chin is wobbling dangerously, and after a moment, he walks over and stands in front of Jason. “Dad. Good to see you,” he says roughly, and pulls Jason into a quick, rough hug. It’s more than Jason expected.

Hotch is smiling. Jason thinks that one small section of hell just froze over.

They spend a few minutes making meaningless small talk, Spencer trying to explain to Robin (his wife) about who precisely Jason is while Jason talks quietly to Dave and Hotch, desperately trying to explain himself, trying explain away nearly twenty years. Finally, Dave holds up a hand.

“Jason. You’re family. It doesn’t matter.”

After about fifteen minutes of catching up, the entire family together again, the photographer coughs loudly.

“Look, can I take a family portrait or something? Because I’m getting the feeling that something very important and touching just happened, and while I’m very happy that you’re happy, you’re paying me by the hour, and I’m very expensive. So. Portrait?”

#And the one that never did#

A family portrait hangs above the fireplace in the house where Aaron Hotchner, David Rossi, and Jason Gideon live. It’s larger than all the other family photos in the living room, which show grandchildren and spouses and cousins and nieces and nephews and aunts and uncles, and is clearly the centerpiece of the entire room.

In it are six young adults, four women and two men, smiling cheerfully at the camera. And standing behind them are the three men that raised them. All were once married in the formal, official way, only to lose their wives to death or divorce. They never thought they would marry again.

And while their partnership is not, legally, a marriage, there is no denying that they _are_ married.

They have the family to prove it.


End file.
